A novel approach to YouTube

Nearly every mainstream media outlet has found its entertainment video clips pop up on top online video sharing site YouTube. Now it’s the publishing industry’s turn.To promote author Michael Connelly’s new murder mystery “Echo Park”, publisher Little, Brown and Co. produced a 10-minute video trailer to promote the book.”The philosophy is just to create a movie-releases type of excitement for it,” Anthony Goff, an associate at Little, Brown’s audio and digital media group, tells the Los Angeles Times.If first-week sales are any indication, it’s already working, the Times reports. “I do know statistically that the first week of sales for ‘Echo Park’ was the best first week of sales I’ve had,” Connelly tells the Times.Connelly’s book isn’t the first time book publishers have toyed with YouTube to promote books. Farrar, Straus and Giroux in August uploaded a one and a half minute video trailer for “The Mystery Guest,” a memoir from French writer Gregoire Bouillier, according to the Times.For Little, Brown, Connelly had an ulterior motive aside from books sales. “It was kind of a steppingstone,” Echo Park trailer screenwriter Terrill Lee Lankford said in the Times interview. “We could make a movie of this.”(Click on the picture to view the video)